Acts of Devotion

By James Wood

Published: November 28, 2004

GILEAD
By Marilynne Robinson.
247 pp. Farrar,

Straus & Giroux. $23.

TO bloom only every 20 years would make, you would think, for anxious or vainglorious flowerings. But Marilynne Robinson, whose last (and first) novel, ''Housekeeping,'' appeared in 1981, seems to have the kind of sensibility that is sanguine about intermittence. It is a mind as religious as it is literary -- perhaps more religious than literary -- in which silence is itself a quality, and in which the space around words may be full of noises. A remarkable, deeply unfashionable book of essays, ''The Death of Adam'' (1998), in which Robinson passionately defended John Calvin and American Puritanism, among other topics, suggested that, far from suffering writer's block, Robinson was exploring thinker's flow: she was moving at her own speed, returning repeatedly to theological questions and using the essay to hold certain goods that, for one reason or another, had not yet found domicile in fictional form.

But here is a second novel, and it is no surprise to find that it is religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. ''Gilead'' is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid -- and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville.

''Gilead'' is set in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and is narrated by a 76-year-old pastor named John Ames, who has recently been told he has angina pectoris and believes he is facing imminent death. In this terminal spirit, he decides to write a long letter to his 7-year-old son, the fruit of a recent marriage to a much younger woman. This novel is that letter, set down in the easy, discontinuous form of a diary, mixing long and short entries, reminiscences, moral advice and so on. (Robinson was perhaps influenced by the similar forms of the two most famous books narrated by clergymen, Francis Kilvert's diary and Georges Bernanos's novel ''The Diary of a Country Priest.'')

Robinson, as if relishing the imposition, has instantly made things hard for herself: the diary form that reports on daily and habitual occurrences tends to be relatively static; it is difficult to whip the donkey of dailiness into big, bucking, dramatic scenes. Those who, like this reader, feel that novels -- especially novels about clergymen -- are best when secular, comic and social, may need a few pages to get over the lack of these elements. In fact, ''Gilead'' does have a gentle sort of comedy -- though there is nothing here to match the amusing portraits in ''Housekeeping'' -- but it is certainly a pious, even perhaps a devotional work, and its characters move in a very small society.

The great danger of the clergyman in fiction is that his doctrinal belief will leak into the root system of the novel and turn argument into piety, drama into sermon. This is one of the reasons that, in the English tradition, from Henry Fielding to Barbara Pym, the local vicar is usually safely contained as hypocritical, absurd or possibly a bit dimwitted. Robinson's pastor is that most difficult narrator from a novelist's point of view, a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust -- or just an intriguing unreliability.

John Ames has cherished baptizing infants: ''That feeling of a baby's brow against the palm of your hand -- how I have loved this life.'' He loves the landscape too: ''I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.'' When he informs us that he has written more than 2,000 sermons, and that he has written almost all of them ''in the deepest hope and conviction,'' the reader surely protests: ''Never in boredom or fatigue or sheer diligence?'' and perhaps thinks longingly of Yorick, the parson in ''Tristram Shandy'' who, at the bottom of his eloquent funeral eulogy, is seen to have written an improper ''Bravo!'' to himself, so secularly pleased is he with his own eloquence.

But while John Ames may be a good man, he is not an uninteresting one, and he has a real tale to tell. His grandfather, also named John Ames and also a preacher, came out to Kansas from Maine in the 1830's and ended up fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. He knew John Brown and lost an eye in that war. The book's narrator remembers his grandfather as a formidable, old-fashioned warrior for God who used to conduct church services while wearing his pistol.

Robinson's portraits of the old man are vivid slashes of poetry. Marvelously, we see Grandfather Ames as ''a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it.'' He seemed to his grandson ''stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew except for certain of his friends.'' Our narrator recalls entering the house as a little boy and being told by his mother that ''the Lord is in the parlor.'' Looking in, he sees his grandfather talking with God, ''looking attentive and sociable and gravely pleased. I would hear a remark from time to time, 'I see your point,' or 'I have often felt that way myself.' ''